8.
Spiraling Back in the Relative Present: Logical Consistencies in “Çingene” Representations in the 1990s

The
discursive power of Kaygılı’s book lies in several stylistic and
narrative features. The author purportedly narrates actual events that
took place around 1914-19, and places himself in the book as the
narrator of events that occurred in his lifetime. The references to
actual locales, neighborhoods, and people of Istanbul ground this work
as a realistic portrayal. Thus this story’s pertinence is not to be seen
as limited to an Istanbul intellectual’s narrative portrait of a sense
of urban place and moral order at a particular point in time. His
fascination with “çingene” lifestyles and his perception of moral
danger born of contact with “çingene” communities and their
purportedly contaminating life style continued to be drawn upon in the
1990s as a scholarly resource and for insight into the character of
urban “çingene.” Hence scholars and journalists continue to use
the information in this book as a factual resource on actual
communities, their residency patterns, and for references to known
Roman musicians in their accounts of contemporary, as well as
historical, Turkish Roman. In this way, a period story of
Istanbul Roman communities has come to be seen as a social truth,
due to its resonance with social pre-formed understandings of “çingene”
character in the mind of urban readers. Writers have also reproduced
Kaygılı’s text transcriptions of songs in later sources, such as the
example of a Romanes-language lullaby (Kaygılı 139: 11). This
lullaby has been repeatedly inserted as an example of a Romanes
language song in later sources (Irmak 1999: 6; Sakaoğlu 1995: 36). Thus
not only standing for a social truth, this fictional text has become a
resource for the scholarly reconstruction of Turkish Roman
history.

However, it is significant to note the evaluations of moral decay that
link images of social disintegration from the 1990 novel and subsequent
movie, Heavy Novel/Heavy Roman, to the critics’ responses
to Ciguli’s comic and entertaining acts. The decline of moral judgments,
cultural bankruptcy, and the degradation of music originally associated
with taverns and drinking establishments (taverna and meyhane),
in the words of one critic, “now as common as gum in the mouth” signify
for critics and intellectuals a malaise of civilization (medeniyet).

The symptom and cause are linked in the persona of the “çingene”, a
persona which non-Roman have created, maintained, and into which
they have invested their own cultural ---as well as
economic---capital.